Key Takeaways
- The saturation of AI has created convenience for marketers looking to scale their output, but it creates a difficult question about how to balance quality against efficiency.
- Social media marketers have used AI for writing ad copy, optimizing and refining audience reach for campaigns, and even developing full-on ad creatives.
- We often find AI useful for processes like creating messaging matrices and generating ideas, but not for full-on creatives.
- Human insight is still the ideal tool for coming up with effective social media ad creatives, while AI is better served as a supplement to this process.
The Role of AI in Social Media Advertising
As more and more AI tools hit the market, social media marketers are weighing the pros and cons of generating rapid ads and exploring how to leverage AI to flip rapid creatives into strong conversion drivers. The landscape has gotten to the point where, if you’re scrolling social media for longer than a few minutes, you’re likely to come across at least one AI-generated ad. However, finding the balance between convenience and quality is a challenge, as many people can see right through AI-generated content.
While it can be a helpful tool in your social media ad creation, AI should remain only a tool, and not the full process. In fact, I find that the best use of AI for social media ad creation is to support the creation process rather than take it over. Instead of using AI to create ads, it excels as a tool for providing ideas and handling tasks like building brand matrices, without watering down brand image in questionable creatives.
What We’re Seeing With AI in Social Media Advertising
We’ve seen AI be used for social media ads in all kinds of ways, ranging from more justifiable to less promising. Uses included everything from tweaking ad copy to generating complete ad creatives.
Common uses for AI in the world of paid social so far include:
- Writing or refining ad copy
- Creating ad images
- Generating full ad videos
- Refining audience targeting
- Optimizing new campaigns based on user behavior
More marketers are using AI for social media ad creation to access quick, usable ads. However, efficiency matters very little if AI-generated ads are obvious to spot and low-quality, causing your audience to scroll past. As many as 36% of people say they are “less likely” to buy from a brand that uses AI in their ads, with only 10% saying they’d be more likely to choose the brand.
While there is still a lot of middle ground there, AI-generated ads that are unengaging or inauthentic miss the mark. We’ve seen AI go as far as creating entire influencer videos to promote a product. AI-powered video generation tools now even exist directly in the Meta Advantage+ creative suite, allowing you to create dynamic video ads from an image or URL.
While this can quickly give you UGC content at the drop of a dime, it begs the question, “Does it water down the use of testimonials if the social proof is fake?” We think yes.
Common AI Tools for Social Media Ad Creation
Many tools have sprung up as AI has cemented itself in the marketing world, boasting new features that are marketed as destined to optimize your ad creation. These tools take on tasks that span from offering feedback on ad copy to creating full-blown videos.
Some common tools include:
- ChatGPT Meta Ad Wizard – An offshoot of ChatGPT that offers feedback on Meta ads and ad copy to help refine them.
- MetaAdvantage+ – Meta’s built-in tool that helps create ads, but is often buggy and may require additional refinement to account for all aspects of a brand’s voice and tone.
- Canva Magic Studio – A new suite of AI-powered tools integrated within Canva to generate images, presentations, and videos while offering advanced editing capabilities.
- Creatify – An AI-based video ad generator used to quickly create short-form video content for social media platforms.
- Jasper – An AI-centered content marketing platform that helps generate content like blog posts, ad copy, and social media captions.
These tools allow for quick creatives, but that doesn’t mean they are ideal for driving engagement and bringing results. You will likely find that there is still plenty of editing to be done after receiving AI-generated ad output. Some of these, like Canva Magic Studio, can be beneficial for spot touches in ads that are ultimately human-created, but the key is not to lean too heavily to one side.
How We Use AI for Social Media Ads
At collystring, we believe AI can be helpful in creating social media ads when used responsibly. We use AI tools to help plan, ideate, and refine content in conjunction with our designer’s expertise to make the process move a bit faster without sacrificing respect for brand guidelines. Despite the speed some marketers enjoy from AI ad creation, we find that the human touch remains a very important part of the process. Still, AI tools can help provide a boost.
Some of the ways that we do use AI include:
- Advantage+ or Performance+ algorithm audience optimization to expand campaign reach
- Generating initial ad copy before manual refinement
- Training an AI on brand guidelines to provide help with headlines and body text
- Creating initial drafts of creative briefs to pass off to our designer to expand upon
- Remarketing to select audience members based on user behavior
- Creating messaging matrices to map brand messages to unique audiences
We’ve realized the common theme that AI tools are not always the best at refining for the brand and making ads in select tones. Our success comes from knowing the limitations of these tools, using them to make our processes more efficient rather than trying to quickly get generated ads out the door.
Key Considerations when Using AI for Social Media Ads
When using AI to support your paid social strategy, it’s crucial that you recognize its limits. The line between efficiency and quality rests on knowing when to trust AI and when not to.
Here are some considerations I recommend keeping in mind:
- AI can take away from brand value and water down a unique brand voice unless you have refined the tool to the brand style very well.
- Generative AI ads are rarely ready to post and require extensive editing to find something that works, so you should never use AI for a final
- We are consistently experimenting and doing regular reviews of performance so we are well in touch with what styles and formats are working and what aren’t, so we can adjust for future ads.
Speaking for myself and our team as social media users, we do not like seeing AI ads when scrolling our personal feeds. Any good marketer should consider the viewer’s perspective above all else. While creating an ad with AI may feel more efficient and convenient, you lose that efficiency if your viewer dismisses AI content and keeps scrolling.
As of right now, we believe AI’s place in ad creation is still as a supplement, rather than the main formula. However, that isn’t to say that these tools won’t continue to get better at creating ready-to-go social ads, because they obviously are advancing every day. As AI continues to improve, our feelings toward it may improve as well, and our processes may shift to use it more when it makes sense.
Create Authentic Winning Ads with collystring
While AI can be a helpful tool, it is not a replacement for a trained eye in creating social media ads that speak to real people and what gets them to act. Successful AI use can help optimize backend processes and ideation, but ad creation is best left to the human touch.
At collystring, our Paid Social team has built processes around getting results, creating ads with a focus on strategic design and an understanding of what gets users to convert, while staying true to brand guidelines and speaking to real humans. From there, we use select tools to organize information and identify opportunities for optimization or refinement to ensure ads achieve their ultimate goals.
Get in touch with us to schedule a discovery call about how we can refine your strategy.